Thursday, June 17, 2021

 Thursday, June 17, 2021

 

Wow! Today was filled with excitement! When I got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, my phone screen lit up. I figured it would turn itself off. Not. I turned the phone face down, so the light didn’t bother me, and planned to deal with it in the morning. I did intuit that the phone might need to be rebooted. However, I was concerned it was more serious because I had dropped it two days before. 

When I got up, I tried to turn it off. The screen instructed me to swipe to turn it off showed, but it didn’t respond to my touch. I tried a force shut down. I held down the lower volume button and the off/on button on the other side of the phone. The emergency light went on. Then my phone made a siren sound. Next, I had someone on the other end asking if she should notify my emergency contacts. I told her no, I was having a problem with my phone. I went about getting dressed. The next thing I knew, Yvette was standing in my bathroom with a wild look in her eyes. I apologized and assured her I was fine, explaining the situation. She told me she had vaulted the fence to get to me quickly. Oh, boy! Sounds like I can count on her!

In the meantime, I discovered I still have Mike listed as an emergency contact. I will have to change that. If someone has his number, they will receive an emergency notification.

My first session was with twin A. I continued identifying the letters in her name. Today I showed her how to hold the visual image of the letter in the front of her mind and the name of the letter in the auditory center off to the left side in the temple area. I had her mother help with the next step. She pressed the save button (the kid’s nose- I work with elementary school children), and then sent it down the hippocampal formation to long-term memory. Next, I had the mom make a clockwise motion on A’s head just above her left ear. A confirmed that this produced a ‘weird’ feeling. Great. That usually signals that something new is happening. I will continue with just the letters of her name until they roll off her tongue consistently with ease. 

I started with the second twin today. E knows the letters of the alphabet but cannot read. I was going to start with a passage from Carpenter Phonics, designed for beginning readers. However, the moment I started with E, it became clear that even this was too hard for her. I thought for a minute and decided to work with the words in the word family, bat, cat, hat, mat, and pat. She could name all the letters. She recognized the word cat and could give me the sounds. When I wrote bat, she was stumped. I had her give the sounds of the a and the t and helped her blend them. Holding on to sounds and blending is a big problem for this child.

I asked E’s mom if this was better, the same, or worse than usual. The mom said, “Much better. I have tears in my eyes.”

At 9:30, I signed into the Zoom meeting for Julia’s office hours. I had problems signing into The BookNook reading program with the Step Up Tutoring program. They have asked us to use the program over the summer. BookNook only works on Chrome, and I had problems downloading that server on my Mac. The problem was solved when I went on the Surface Book Pro I usually use for my Zoom sessions. It already had Chrome on it, and I was able to get into the BookNook site. I went over the procedure again. It’s a little complicated. The review was helpful.

There were only a few people in Julia’s office at one time. She was finishing with another tutor. When I was alone, I didn’t have to feel I was hogging time that could have been used more wisely. I’m such a technical ditz. 

Because I was panicked that I had broken the phone, I decided to go down to the T-Mobile store for help. I did try to call T-Mobile for help. I had them call me back. I was about to be connected to a tech when the call was dropped. I canceled one of my students this morning, figuring I would be at the store for hours. 

The T-Mobile rep was right on it. I was right; the phone had to be rebooted. The rep who sold me the phone showed me how to do the force stop, but I didn’t remember. For future reference: press the top volume button, let go, then the bottom volume button, let go, and finally, hold the on/off button until the Apple logo shows up on the screen. I was in and out quickly. I called the student I canceled, J in California, to tell him I would be home for our previously scheduled appointment.

    In my session with J, I managed to open BookNook on my end. He tried to open it on his phone. He couldn’t because the program needed more space. He had an iPad available and got that. Then he had trouble getting in. His screen shared his view. Once he got in, he got to play a game. I was waiting for the game to stop so I could continue with the reading. It went on and on and on. He was having a good time. I have no idea how to control this program -yet.

       At 2 pm, I had a Zoom session with A, in Orlando, Florida, where he was visiting his grandparents. The session was supposed to be yesterday, but his grandparents couldn’t figure out how to connect to the Internet in the hotel. My last session with A had been on the second. While he still made some mistakes with the first two sight word lists, he hadn’t lost anything and may even have had a small gain. However, I thought the situation was bad for him.

    A is burdened by his delayed learning. He is resistant to following my directions because he wants to be ‘normal.’ Here he was in the middle of a relaxed, fun time, having to be reminded that he’s not ‘normal.’ Too boot, he was in a hotel room with his older brother, who sat there listening to every mistake A made.  

     I called his mother and told her I thought continuing the sessions while traveling was a bad idea. Instead, we should pick it up in July when he returned home to Hawaii. I recommended that she tell him that since he had done a little better, I didn’t feel we had to have extra sessions while traveling.

I have had items for donation sitting in my living room since the Covid began. I loaded a used ceiling fan Scott brought me from a job at the Bike Shop and a fabulous area rug that Peaches chewed on when she was young. I discovered that Habitat would take neither of them. I drove down to Goodwill to drop off what I could there. They took a box of long-sleeved men’s shirts but passed on the fan and the rug.